


Too Much, Too Fast

by RunSquidling



Category: Loveless
Genre: Denial, Gen, Healing, Implied/Referenced Dubious Consent, Recovery, Therapy Session, complicated feelings, past child sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-06
Updated: 2019-05-06
Packaged: 2020-02-27 02:13:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18729649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RunSquidling/pseuds/RunSquidling
Summary: Ritsuka tells his therapist about some things Seimei used to do. He thinks it was probably okay—Seimei wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t okay, and he still has his ears, after all—but some small, insistent part of him needs to make sure.





	Too Much, Too Fast

**Author's Note:**

> I actually don't remember how Loveless ended, so please assume that this is set after all of the plot is resolved, and Ritsuka went back to living a regular life a while ago.

Ritsuka actually wanted to talk to Dr. Katsuko today. He sat on her couch, homework spread across her table, staring sightlessly at the worksheets and books. He’d been seeing her for so long now, though, that he didn’t know how to start. He was used to not wanting to talk to her. He was used to not having anything to talk about. But he’d turned fifteen recently, and though no older memories had returned, some long-held and previously-cherished ones had... changed.

“You’ve been staring at that worksheet for a while, Ritsuka-kun,” Dr. Katsuko said in her curious, probing voice. “Is there something you want to talk about?”

After a moment’s hesitation, he shook his head, and moved on to another worksheet.

“Even if it’s something insignificant, we can still talk about it,” Dr. Katsuko said. “It’s alright if it doesn’t seem to be important.” She paused, and added, as always, “Did you remember something?”

“No,” he said. The worksheet wasn’t making sense. It should be easy, but he was preoccupied, had been all week, and it wasn’t going away on its own.

“Do you know about brothers?” he asked. He’d given up on his homework, but his hands had tightened around the worksheet nonetheless.

“What about them?” she asked. He loved the way she asked. She sounded interested, invested, but not like she felt sorry for him, or wanted to help the way grown-ups usually did, even when they couldn’t. 

“I mean, you can’t be brothers with anyone, because you’re a girl. So I don’t know if you can understand.”

“Maybe not.” 

On the rare occasions when he talked, she always believed him, or at least believed that he wasn’t stupid, even when he was wrong, and that was the only reason he was bringing this up at all. His heart was pounding. He felt like an idiot; nothing was going on, obviously, everything was fine, and he shouldn’t be this nervous. 

“But I’d like to hear what you’re thinking anyway, even if I don’t understand.”

“Okay.” 

Not nervous. Scared.

“My brother loved me a lot. And he protected me from my mom. And I don’t want you to think anything bad about him. But I... learned some things, about him, a few years ago. He did some really bad stuff. And I didn’t like hearing about it. I wanted the people who were telling me to shut up, I didn’t want to hear it, I didn’t want Seimei to have done those things. But I... wasn’t that surprised.”

“What kind of things?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ritsuka said, staring down the kanji on his worksheet. He should have just done his homework. He didn’t want to talk about this. But now that he’d started, he found his mouth moving of its own accord, and he couldn’t stop. 

“Dr. Katsuko, is it normal for brothers to kiss? Brothers who really, really love each other?”

And this was the part he hated about Dr. Katsuko. She never answered your questions when she wanted you to keep talking. She just looked at you with a slightly cocked head and neutral curiosity in her eyes and _waited_ and somehow, every time, he found words being pulled out of him. He didn’t know, this time, whether he felt relieved or destroyed.

“He loved me, you know? He loved me, and he saved me from mom, and I was scared and I loved him so I stayed in his room most of the time. And after he saved me, after he got me out of there and made Mom calm down, he’d come up to his room and he’d tell me it was alright and it wasn’t my fault and he’d kiss me. And... I mean, it was nice, I liked it. I was scared, and he was telling me it was okay, and he loved me. And this is dumb, right? He loved me. He was just helping me calm down.”

“Sometimes we can like things, and feel uncomfortable, at the same time.” She looked at him, head still cocked, like she _knew_ there was more and she’d let him keep quiet if he sealed up and refused, but she wasn’t going to let him forget that she knew he wasn’t done. 

His hands were crinkling the worksheet. He forced them open, smoothed out the edges, and tried to keep his mouth shut, but he’d started, he’d _started_ and he knew she knew and he couldn’t keep it in anymore.

“There was more. I thought the things we did were okay because we both still had our ears, but I’m fifteen too, now, and if I had a ten-year-old brother I wouldn’t touch him like that.” He managed to squeeze his teeth together at the last second, to keep from telling her everything. That was private. That was _his_. It had felt good, at the time, if a little out of control, a little too _much_ , and he didn’t like how his memories of those times were changing. The way the _too much_ was getting to be more important than the _good_. 

“You’re right, Ritsuka,” she said, but she didn’t sound angry, like he was afraid she would. “Brothers don’t normally do that.”

“How would you know? You’re not brothers with anyone, it could be...” He trailed off. She was looking at him with a strange quirk to her eyebrows, like she was working something out.

“I know you’re not comfortable with what happened,” she said. “Ritsuka, I want you to think about something for me, okay? I want you to think about the way you even thought about your ears, at all.”

He was silent. He didn’t want to think about that. Sometimes, he’d really been worried about them. But they’d never fallen off, and he’d just assumed that meant what they were doing was okay.

“It’s not normal for your brother to touch you in a way that makes you think about your ears.”

“But they never... I’ve still got them, though. And so did he.”

“But you were afraid you wouldn’t, sometimes, weren’t you? And like you said. If you had a ten-year-old brother, you wouldn’t do those things. Do you have any idea when this started?”

Ritsuka shook his head.

“I’m going to propose something, okay? And it might make a few things make sense.” She got up, spent longer than necessary filling a glass of water, and came back to her seat, sipping it. Ritsuka couldn’t tell whether she’d seen his impending freakout or not, but he appreciated the few moments to collect himself nonetheless. 

“I think this started when you were ten.” 

Even with this, she talked matter-of-factly, like she wasn’t breaking Ritsuka’s world to pieces right now, like she believed what had happened was wrong but she didn’t pity him. He put his hands in his lap and gripped his pants, to save his homework.

“I think, when this started, your grades changed, and your socializing pattern changed, and your mother decided that you’d left and been replaced by someone else. But really, you were going through something that was too big for you, and you needed help.”

“I didn’t need help. I was fine. Seimei never hurt me. He protected me!”

“Did anyone else ever touch you in a way that made you uncomfortable?”

Ritsuka clammed up. He didn’t want to talk about Soubi. He’d missed Seimei so much, and then there Soubi was, Seimei’s friend, and he’d wanted to get as close as possible to anything that was connected to Seimei, and when Soubi kissed him, it had been weird, but he hadn’t been sure how he felt. Because it was so close to kissing Seimei. Soubi was Seimei’s friend. He’d kissed back because it felt right, even though he wasn’t sure. And he’d felt terrible about it. Like he was betraying Seimei--and like he was getting swept up in something he wouldn’t be able to stop. The kissing, the fighting, the connection, and his horrible name, that name that made him feel empty and lost and abandoned, like he would never, ever be...

“I just wanted to be loved,” he said, softly, his fingers white where they clutched the fabric of his uniform. “Nobody loved me except Seimei and...”

She cocked her head. Waited.

“Seimei loved me,” he finished.

“I believe you,” Dr. Kastuko said. "But what he did should not have happened to you,” Dr. Katsuko said, firmly, decisively, making Ritsuka tear up because he felt that way, too, but he didn’t feel like he should. Seimei hadn’t meant to hurt him. Seimei thought he liked it.

He had liked it. Mostly. Kind of.

“You deserved to be safe.”

“I thought I was,” he said. “With Seimei. I thought Seimei was safe. I didn’t even mind... the kissing was nice. He loved me. Okay? He loved me. It’s the stuff I learned later that... made it feel different.” He pulled the flesh of his cheek between his teeth, chewing too hard. His next words came out barely audible. “Is it okay that it felt nice? If what we were doing was wrong… shouldn’t I have been scared? Or something?”

“Not necessarily,” she said. “You trusted Seimei. Do you think it’s fair to expect a ten-year-old to know that something that feels good should frighten him?”

He didn’t like that question, so he ignored it, and managed to ask about the thing that bothered him the most. 

“What if I... started it? Sometimes?”

She nodded, like she’d been expecting this.

“If you had a ten-year-old brother right now, and he tried to touch you like you touched Seimei, what would you do?”

Ritsuka didn’t want to answer that. He chewed the inside of his cheek, and clenched his hands tight in the stiff fabric of his pants, white-knuckled and frozen. He would feel uncomfortable, and really, really worried, and he would make him stop and ask him why he was doing this, and if anybody else had touched him— 

“How do you feel right now?”

Ritsuka shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. He shouldn’t have ever brought it up. He and Seimei had a different relationship than he would have with this hypothetical little brother who wasn’t even real. It was special. Seimei had always said he was special, that they were able to do those things because Ritsuka was special, but nobody else would understand, and he couldn’t tell or else they’d take Seimei away and leave Ritsuka all alone with his mother. It hadn’t felt like a threat, at the time. No—it hadn’t _been_ a threat; he didn’t know why he was even thinking that. It hadn’t even been that big a deal—Seimei had never hurt him, never, and if he’d never found out about Moonless, he didn’t think those memories would have soured. 

Probably.

“I’m fine,” he said, forcefully uncurling his stiff fingers, picking up the worksheet he’d crumpled. His cheek was bleeding. Damn it, that was going to hurt for a week. He shouldn’t have brought this up. It wasn’t going to help him remember, and what business was it of Dr. Katsuko’s, if he wasn’t actually going to get better? He felt like he’d betrayed Seimei. He really, really didn’t like that he also felt like Seimei had betrayed him. “I need to finish this.” 

“Thank you for talking to me, Ritsuka,” Dr. Katsuko said, and he narrowed his eyes, focusing hard on the worksheet he could barely see through this stupid, useless, unnecessary film of tears.


End file.
